


Purity

by glittersnipe



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M, emo prince of death, erotic force choking, everything is an abusive cult, extreme repression, thanatotic rituals as a substitute for sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 13:24:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14113284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittersnipe/pseuds/glittersnipe
Summary: She wraps her little hands around your neck and calls you a monster and squeezes with all her might, and you have to take it. “You’re sick,” she says, her mouth on your mouth, tasting your blood. “You sicken me, Ben.” You’ve been here before. In this fantasy she doesn’t let you touch her at all. “You poison everything.”





	Purity

When she lifts the rocks, you feel it in your chest: both exogenous and endogenous, both you and not-you. The singing elation, the joyful communion between body and soul and life and the essential world itself, all radiating from her. The boundary between you both stretched and quivering as she throbs unseen in a sort of blissful oblivion, the aetiology of which is foreign and forbidden to you. And just as the tides break themselves against the shore, powerless to disobey their own nature: the concomitant black and oily rage pooling in you. Your clawing, thanatotic fury, your hatred for her. Rising to meet whatever it is that’s happening inside you like inflammation choking out an infection. Both light and dark leaking from you. Like they burst inside you and emptied you out and took over.

\--

In the days after your spectacular failure on the salt plains, you catch Hux watching you. Rat-faced and dyspeptic. His watery little eyes track your every move, attentive as a lover, silent as a shark. "Rough night, _Supreme Leader_?" he says, as you’re late to yet another morning meeting, your head buzzing from lack of sleep. You can't tell if he means to mock you outright or whether he's failing at masculine jocularity. You've seen the way that the officers conduct themselves in their free moments, how they shove and laugh and jeer at each other. Indulging in the luxury of mockery—you even heard them mocking you, once, your crooked face and your foul temper. 

(Of course you’d made them pay, but later in turn you’d paid for your lack of self-control. Hux had smirked as you shivered and jerked and gasped, flayed by psychic agony beside him, and when the pain was gone he leaned over your body and smiled and said: one must allow the underlings their harmless rebellions. It makes for an excellent prophylactic. But you wouldn’t understand that, of course. You hardly know anything, do you. You just do things.) 

There is no new information about the as-of-now unknown coordinates of the Resistance. You are still working on Hux’s connections on Canto Bight; he has a network, he tells you, which will produce results. Soon. You sit for as long as you can before it becomes too much for you to bear, their painful incompetence, the memories of your humiliation. There is a throbbing like an aching abscess that your mind keeps brushing up against—what now, what next, what have you done, where is she, what—STOP, you think, violently. The drinking glasses on the polished onyx table begin, slowly, to tremble at first and then rattle as your fists close around themselves. You dig your leather-clad fingers into your leather-clad palm, your jaw clenched painfully, the very air around you tightening as the glasses take flight and hover above their coasters one by one. Your men still and Hux gives you a look half in fear and half in anger, and you seethe, rising. The glasses go flying and before you know it you are screaming something and they are cowering and you feel, at least a little, like yourself again. Whatever that is, now.

\--

Caught in stasis while your men work, you pace relentlessly throughout the ship. Day and night. Your bare face is still a shock to the people around you. You can feel their gaze crawling over your skin, into the hollows of your eyes; you feel them sizing you up, glances skittering away when they’re caught. In the days since Snoke’s death you’ve found it harder and harder to keep the borders between yourself and others intact, and you can hear things, their stupid little thoughts, seemingly shocked that you’re a person with a face, wondering where you got that scar or mocking your vanity for your long hair. You feel a sudden surge of embarrassed resentment—aren’t you allowed to have one thing that’s yours?—which quickly subsides into familiar, comfortable anger at all the men around you. 

As a child you’d had long hair. No one to keep it trimmed or neat. You hadn’t been around other children very much, so you had no idea how common this was or wasn’t, although you remember snide comments that you hadn’t understood at the time. Adults usually reacted oddly to you; you were a strange child whose behaviour didn’t always make sense. You heard things in the dark. Your mother had—well. Irrelevant. Snoke had had your head shaven a week after you arrived and had kept it that way for several years. As a disciple you were entitled to nothing of your own, body or soul. _A pure mind has nothing to hide._

When you arrived at first with your feral heart aflame and the ashes still clinging to you, he was kind. You remember that. You sank to your knees before him, in his golden robes, the slippers he would later make you kiss. Among other things he’d make you do. Your dusty clothes were still covered in blood and scraped against your skin as you bent and supplicated, your nose on the shining floor. Later, you’d never been able to recover the memory of how exactly you got there. Not exactly blurred by time or trauma, just—gone. How you landed where you landed, why you did what you did. You know you made choices, along the way (you must have) but where did they go? You remember crazed eyes in the dark, your heart seizing from sleep when you thought you were going to die, but what happened after that?

Snoke had held your bloody face in his hands. He wiped the tears from your eyes. _You’re a man now,_ he said. _You are strong, and you are righteous. You have been chosen. You will do so much for me._

Although you know it was a moment of triumph—purged of Jedi lies, finally restored to your legacy, led at last by a worthy power you stood to inherit—it too has been withered and soured by time. You remember some things with clarity and those you hold on to fiercely like shards of glass in your closed fist, but this memory is like a drugged dream. You must have cut a pathetic figure—you were a clutching anaclitic child, with an unfortunate and overwrought tendency towards tears. He’d held you in place with his large twisted hands, his thumbs digging in slightly, into the sweaty tearstained flesh of your tender face. He had searched your eyes for something and you’d—relaxed into what was not quite an embrace. Not relaxed. Wilted. It wasn’t necessarily that you felt relief but more like you could finally stop fighting. Like you were succumbing. Something inside you had fallen or collapsed into place.

Sniffling and snivelling and shaking, you’d nodded while he told you to join him. You do remember that, at the very least. The choice you made. You did that.

\--

In the gym you spar, brushing up against the throb of the bond again and again like pressing on a bruise, harder and harder until you can barely breathe and then‚ with a sudden poisoned bursting—there she is. You turn and you try to breathe some calm back into yourself. You always knew this was inevitable.

She is looking at you with a mixture of revulsion and fear, her eyes flickering to the sweat on your brow, your bare feet, your chest. Your hair is sticking to your face, your skin turning to gooseflesh as your sweat dries. Blood thuds in your ears. She is wearing her usual non-descript clothes but her hair is loose around her face, which is tilted up to you and lit dimly with a faraway light. Her face is so small, you think, and then like the crack of a laser, the thought is gone. It's not relevant (but what would it mean, to think this? You could do it. Nobody is watching you now). There is light all around her—she must be near a fire of some kind—and it catches on her shoulders, the dark hair on her bare calves. 

"Why are you still doing this?" she says, finally. Wary like a little fox, watching you. Her body mirroring yours. Slowly backing away. She has a black smear of oil on one cheek. 

"I didn’t. It hurt, this time," you say. "Did it hurt you?"

"What do you care," she says. Her shoulders square up, her feet widening, mirroring your stance. "You don’t care if it hurts me. You want me dead." Still so defiant, still goading you. “You want to see everything dead.”

There are so many things you could say to this. Certainly you do hate her and certainly you have killed her in your dreams. But there are other dreams you aren’t able to remember. She is staring at you as you think, and you can feel her readying to pounce. You can smell her body, a sour and animal smell of dried days-old sweat and dirt and rotting cloth. It’s so immediate and close, so disgusting and vital.

"You want to see me dead," you settle on, finally. What else can you say? 

“You kill everyone I love, Ben,” she says. Her lip trembles as she swallows, her face crumpled in anger and sorrow. “You destroy _everything_ ,” her voice rising higher and higher, “I thought there was good in you but everything you touch just turns to—to ashes and dust!”

“I did it for _you_ ,” you shriek, and your voice is as uneven as hers, it hurts coming out, it tears like she is pulling the words on a fish hook through the wet muscle of your throat. How can she pull these things out of you that you didn’t even know were there? “I thought you’d understand, I saw you—what did I destroy? A rotting legacy? An old man who’d happily murder a sleeping child?” 

You don’t know how she can’t understand this. All her love and strength and power, all that beautiful brightness you felt in your own body like it could be a part of you, and for what? A cowardly old murderer, a dead cult based on lies and hypocrisy, a galaxy out of control, festering in anarchy? Her face is shining and pink. Her nose is dripping mucus. She looks smaller, but suddenly she surges forward and you step backwards before you register it. Her eyes widen, just slightly. She scrubs fiercely at her face, leaving moist trails of dampness down her cheek and across her wet lips, the oil smearing. “I know what you think you saw, but he wasn’t going to!” she says. “He’s not the man you think he is, Ben!” 

But you know what happened. This memory was yours alone. 

“You presume to know what I think I saw,” you say, and oh, you’re so angry you can hardly breathe, now. You’ve been allowed so few thoughts for so long, you have so few memories to call your own, and you’ve kept this one to warm your hands at, Luke Skywalker’s twisted face as he raised his lightsaber—and how dare she tell you this memory is wrong, too? “You don’t know what he did. You don’t know him at all, you’re just a child desperate for validation running squealing from one father to the next, and you tell me what he’s capable of?” 

Your voice doesn’t sound like your own. When you’re as angry as this it’s like you’re not even there at all. 

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand—Snoke used you, I know he did,” she says. “I know you know. You _must_ know.” But you’re shaking, now, your vision white at the edges, and as you advance on her whatever limited self-preservation she still has left must kick in, because the next minute, she’s gone. Her sudden absence is as painful as her presence was. It knocks the breath from you. Her smell lingers in the room. 

You train alone in the gym until your knuckles crack and bleed.

\--

Snoke always told you this: you have a ravenous animal’s heart that only knows how to want. You needed discipline, control. You were so frightened when you came to him, a gawky teenager, so unbalanced the ground ripples around you as you walked. On Ahch-To after everything changed the sea contracted to escape you and the wind flayed you and the animals bared their teeth as you passed. Even the fucking porgs didn’t like you. The sky itself seemed to flinch away from you at times, and your fellow disciples would not meet your eyes. It was like there was something poisoned in you that was leaking out. You tried to understand what was happening to you, to your body, but you could not. You tried—you did try. You remember that. 

But your uncle shied away from you, though he tried to hide it, and the others learned to shun you and spit at you. You still feel it, sometimes, the chthonic curls of shame when you realised, finally, that Luke saw you for what you were. That you were known. That everyone else could see whatever was happening to you too, could see whatever had gotten its claws into you so deeply that half the time it didn’t even feel like it was you in your own body. You’d watch your hands doing things and think, is that me? The most vile thoughts in your head, thoughts you’d never had before, that made your throat catch. But it must have been you. If everyone else could see it too it must have been you the whole time. 

Now you know Luke for the hypocrite he is, of course. But you’ll always remember this, the moment his eyes narrowed and his hand fell from your shoulder, the moment when your soul was weighed and found wanting. 

It is a gift that they are afraid of you, Snoke had said. But you need to learn to control yourself. You thought about that a lot, how the more you craved control over yourself the more it seemed to slip from your fingers. As you grew older and the punishments for transgression got worse and worse. As you fought a miserable internecine war against the thoughts that sprouted and grew like weeds in your crevices, caressed by Snoke as he found and pulled them up by the roots, one by one. A teenager, and then a young man, you were dragged before him again and again. You foolish child, he said, his voice like nails inside you, actual physical nails you could feel shredding you up, You lack loyalty. After I brought you here. After all I’ve done for you. You disappoint me.

Over time you learned that it didn’t matter what you’d say. But when you were younger you thought you could convince him. You pleaded your fealty, you prostrated, you humiliated yourself, but still you could not be what you were supposed to. First you wanted to be your dad and then you wanted to be Luke and then you wanted to be Snoke and and then you wanted to be Vader and from the wreckage of everything you wanted so badly you cobbled together Kylo Ren. 

You need discipline, Snoke told you, over and over, You have never had discipline, you have always been so unruly, so heedless, good for nothing but destruction and it’s true—of course it’s true—but still. A thought, jagged: but weren’t there things you liked, before? In some distant previous life, hadn’t you liked things, hadn’t you liked calligraphy and paints and even, shamefully, flowers, soft things, nice things? And in fact hadn’t your love of rules and pretty things and solitude been a disappointment to yet another faraway figure in this former place? But that can’t be right. You have always been volatile, selfish. You’ve always needed to be taken in hand. 

When you couldn’t reconcile your thoughts, you learned to put them away instead. 

When you killed Snoke it was like you had taken a great breath of stinging sea-air, searing and vital in your black neglected lungs. When she looked into your eyes something inside you, coughing and retching, came to life. All of a sudden you were aware of every fat tentacle inside your head, and how it hurt, like teeth being forced apart by some foreign invader. Like your whole mind was contorted into some deformed thing you could hardly recognise. But her eyes held you in place—like she could see you, even though you were disintegrating—your beloved enemy, your loathed other half. You knew you could do it for both of you, then, for the person she was and the man you might be. You’d seen the future, after all, and in the future you were standing together with your arms around each other. She was crowned and beautiful and strong, your warrior queen. Wind in her hair. Stars in her eyes.

Now you have nothing.

\--

You were given a week or so to recover after you’d arrived on the ship, which you’d mostly spent sedated, and then you started training. There were barracks for the other recruits your age but you were given a separate room and you were nearly always alone. You were special, they said. Sometimes in the night you woke up screaming without knowing why, and sometimes in the morning the furniture around you was warped and smashed. Once you’d woken up in the dark and when you stood up to use the bathroom your feet had crunched and you pulled them up in a sudden shock of pain. When you turned on the light you saw that your mirror had shattered and was everywhere, the floor covered in thousands of little sharp shards of light. Wherever you looked there were contorted fragments of your reflection. In pieces all over the floor. 

Most of the boys you’d trained with are dead now, you suppose. You and Hux are more or less the same age and unfortunately but unsurprisingly he has survived. He has a certain bully’s cunning that you expect will keep him alive until you’ve won this interminable war. You were both teenagers when you met, and though now you simply loathe him at the time he’d frightened you (a funny thought—but back then you had no idea what you’d eventually be capable of). Something about the coldness of his eyes. The way he seemed to enjoy the things you considered necessary. You can still remember a long meeting in an airless room, some time long ago when you were still a teenager. A lecture or something. You were being trained intensively at the time and whenever your attention wandered you felt sharp little zaps of agony, the strange and sick sensations of an exogenous force in your skull. As far as you knew you were the only recruit to experience this; around you, all the other officers in training slumped and slouched. You were only then beginning to realise quite how different you were. Hux, between you and the sunny window, yawned and stretched. 

You were digging the sharp end of your pen into your thigh to keep yourself awake when you noticed that he was prodding a fat bluebottle on the windowsill next to him. Absorbed, he’d lifted the thing—flightlessly buzzing, its body broken in some way—and, upon depositing it on his desk, begun to strip it of its wings. Your head was already beginning to hurt for not paying attention but you kept watching as he methodically separated and pulled each thin filmy wing off the bluebottle’s fat little full stop of a body. When he finished the wings he started working on the legs, pinching each one between his polished fingernails and pulling carefully. When he was finished there was just the nub of the fly left, unable to even buzz but still rocking gently. Its legs and wings were all over. Hux tapped what was left of it into the middle of his desk and watched it there. When he looked up he saw you staring and, although you tried to rearrange your face into neutrality, he reddened at whatever he saw. Snoke had always told you your face was too expressive. Your parents, too. Lots of people. 

His face had twisted, staring at you, and he’d swept the fly and its constituent parts onto the floor, where you guess it died. Was it in pain? Could it feel pain? “It’s only a fly,” he said, sneering. He was watching you carefully and when he saw you hesitate for a second too long he went on the attack. “What? Are you going to cry? Does it make you sad?” 

But it wasn’t the fact of the fly itself, that bothered you, necessarily. It was how methodical he’d been, how he’d pulled the thing apart for no reason, the careful and satisfied look on his face. By that point you’d already done your fair share of damage, but that was different. In service to something greater than yourself, than any one person. What greater calling than bringing order and peace to the universe? You liked to feel powerful, true, but when you fought it was always for the right reasons, for the righteousness of your cause, for the beauty of the vision you saw of a cleansed and perfected world. Hux gave you a bad feeling (another failure of yours, how heavily you rely on instinct. _I have a bad feeling about this_ —no—). He still does. 

In the manner of all bureaucrats with limited imagination he imagines that you both have the same priorities. At briefings, he is still doing his best to ingratiate himself with you, despite how poorly he conceals his deep, deep dislike of you. “I assure you, Supreme Leader, that we’re working on winnowing those little roaches out of their nest,” Hux says. His eyelid twitches. He smiles an oily smile at you. “I am quite sure we’ll have them soon. And then you can have that… loathsome little creature you seem to have such a fascination with.” 

You stiffen.

“Not that I blame you,” he says. His tone is self-consciously airy: we’re men of the world, it says. I know how it is. He looks as though he’s going to attempt a wink but mercifully does not. “I understand perfectly.”

“I want her because she has to be destroyed,” you say. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. You’re a fool. You don’t understand anything.”

His lip curls. “Of course. As you say.”

\--

When you were seventeen, despite two years of extensive training, you still lacked discipline. You were still attached to the past, still a child. Despite the initial beautiful grace you’d been granted, you were testing his patience.

There had been a girl training with you on the island. You remember what she looked like, sort of—serious and olive-complected, gone sallow with the lack of sun, and wavy black hair. One of you had taken a liking to the other and you’d started looking for her while you were studying or eating or doing drills. Before everything that came after. 

One night you had snuck out (her idea—you had always been a rule-follower, right up until you weren’t) and gone down to the damp cave recessed into the cliffside. She had needed you to steady her and you remember how her hand felt clutching yours. You’d huddled next to the shallow rock-pools, full of starfish, reflecting stars. You’d talked. You were both cold and wet and shivery from the excitement of being out late, alone, together. At one point you had kissed. She had taken her hand and put it on your hand and slid your hand up under her shirt. Her skin was warm and soft and her body felt delicate. In the dark you ran your hands over each others’ bodies, under the layers keeping the cold out. 

You weren’t supposed to think about such stupid, tawdy things, once you joined the First Order. You had taken vows, you had pledged purity in thought and intention and deed, inside as well as out. You had given yourself body and soul to the man who had saved you. It won’t be easy, he’d said, once, when you were alone. Only the strongest can withstand it—the weak hoard their wicked impurities. But it is the only way to the truth.

But you were young and weak and still a teenage boy, and one night you had thought about it, alone in your room. How lonely you were. How you hadn’t touched a girl (anyone) in years. The surprise you’d felt when you had been able to feel her heart beating through her breast—the sheer surprise at a body so different to your own, curved and rounded where you were angled and bony. How you’d liked her body just for being what it was. You’d had previous moments of weakness, with this same memory throbbing inside you, but you’d fought against it. Digging your fingernails into yourself until you’d bled. Showers so icy you thought you might suffocate, your whole body freezing with cold shock response. Once you’d hit yourself in the stomach repeatedly while standing in front of your bathroom mirror, daring yourself with each blow, working yourself into a martyr’s hysteria. But that night you were tired and weak and you suddenly remembered how good it had felt.

In the morning you’d been woken by a summon to Snoke’s chambers. Standing before him you were incandescent with shame. 

_I’m very disappointed in you,_ he’d said. _I thought you were stronger than this. I had faith in you._

I’m sorry, you’d said.

_Don’t interrupt me. Before the First Order your existence meant nothing. You know this. So why are you hiding these memories from me? How deep does the corruption go inside you?_

You’d started to reply, to plead, trembling, your cheeks blazing red, when he’d cut you off. What else were you hiding? What depths unmoulded by his discipline? You were like his son, he said, and what father wants to see his son defile himself so? What father—what true father—could stand idly by while his son harmed himself so, while he pleasured (a lurch of nausea, in the boiling pit of your throat) himself to the secret and shameful memories of his past life? 

_Do you reject everything I’ve done for you?_ he had asked, gently.

No, you’d said. There were tears running down your face. No, of course not. You’ve given me everything.

_But you haven’t given me everything. I’ve been extraordinarily generous with you. But you can’t keep doing this._ And suddenly you felt something moving inside you, in your head, agonisingly slow. A probing finger, everywhere. Your knees buckled as you were— _explored_ —and suddenly the image was in your mind of the girl and the stars and the throbbing sea but it was all wrong, just fundamentally wrong in a horrible way you couldn’t even fathom, and then it was suddenly inert. You felt yourself forced back into it, and it back into you, but it wasn’t yours anymore; it wasn’t you any more, just some piece of something inside you. It was there but it was gone. You weren’t able to feel its loss, even. Sobbing, you thanked Snoke for his generosity in allowing you to keep a reminder of your transgression, to allow yourself to improve.

Sometimes, now, you still think about it, this sad little grey memory. All you remember now is how strongly you’d felt what you felt—like something had been and gone and left a evaporated space in a crater. A small and childish part of you hoping maybe it might come back. She did X and someone who was you did Y. You felt things as a result. You know that it meant things once, but now its heart is gone: just a recollection of a recollection, just echoes of yourself. As if it had happened only inside you, only to you. 

\--

You try—you try and try—to shut it out, but still the bond aches and throbs at you, pulling at you so you can hardly stand it. Snatches of conversation; half-dreamt whisperings; vague feelings of sadness, anger, pleasure; thoughts that don’t feel like your own thoughts. What do your thoughts feel like? Does she feel them? Do they feel like anything? Like wind disturbing the sea’s surface her feelings ghost over you: phantom sensations, rough cloth, another person’s hand in your not-hand (whose?), grass, the smell of breakfast. Sometimes a sort of foreign lightness in your chest, sometimes an awful ache. 

Like the last time, the more you struggle, the stronger it gets. Your self-control is slipping. It feels inevitable, like being in the jaws of some great beast. The more you thrash, the tighter it closes around you. You cannot sleep. You cannot eat. Like nausea, black dread mounting relentlessly until you are half-crazed with keeping her away from you. It will find you sooner or later. 

Finally, one night you are in the gym, running yourself into a dreamless sleep, when it happens again. You stop, panting. You can feel her behind you. The back of your neck prickles. 

Suddenly she shrieks. A part of you, for one infinitesimally small split second, wants to smile; her shriek is so her, a sudden explosion of sound muted as quickly as it erupts, her composure regained even as she loses it. When you turn around she’s much closer than you’d thought, and holding a big fluffy towel around her body, her hair wet around her shoulders. She smells clean this time. Her little feet are bare and pale. She clutches at herself and stares at you in mute outrage, as if this is your fault, as if you somehow willed this into being. 

For a long moment she is just looking at you. Somehow, even though you hate her so much that you’re almost excited by it, you can never quite seem to get a hold of yourself around her—she stares, you stare; she moves, you move. Now she is keeping you in stasis. You don’t know where to look, so you keep your face trained on her face. You’re struck by the vulnerability of her bare neck, her clean face, the dripping ropes of hair, the shocking intimacy of it all. Her bare shoulders, dusted with freckles and dotted with little water-droplet gemstones. You didn’t want to see this. It was easier to hate her. On instinct, you reach out a hand—to do what?—and the shock suddenly snaps away from her face. 

“Oh,” you say, stupidly, involuntary. 

It happens so quickly—first you are there and next you feel your throat closing and your feet leaving the floor and the sound of her shout ringing in your ears. Her arm is outflung in a gesture you recognise, and for a second you’d laugh if you could breathe at all, your light-kissed other half wringing the life out of you. It would be an honourable way to die. Since you met her in the snow, you’d thought (no—STOP) that you’d like to die at her hand, if you had to die; now, you think a good death might be the greatest gift she could grant you (STOP). You scratch at your throat, struggling for purchase; you can’t breathe, you can’t think, and you feel—the blood rushes throughout your body, your traitorous body, you feel warm, hot, burning all over, steadily downward—and oh _no_ , you—not now—

She leaves you hanging there, choking for air, as the atmosphere changes and darkens subtly. A flicker of something you don’t recognise crosses her face. You have never been quite so humiliated in your life. Your vision is darkening around the edges. She stares at you, her eyes mortifyingly rake down your body, lingering on you, on all of you, hanged and exposed to her. Perhaps she will actually kill you, after all. Your throat constricts just that bit more. You’re beginning to feel wild kites of euphoria in your stomach, all over your body, mingling pleasure and shame as your vision darkens and your throat is crushed by the phantom pressure, when you see her visibly shake herself. When she drops you, your kneecaps make a loud crack as you land on the floor and keel over onto your side, coughing and retching. For a second, you think you might throw up, as if you haven’t already done enough to embarrass yourself. You are still achingly, painfully hard. 

You don’t know how long you lie on the floor, but when finally you look up, she is still there. Her face is flushed, red blotches creeping down her chest beneath the towel she’s still holding to herself. Your breath comes in harsh rasps. She looks somewhere between shocked, and angry, and—whatever that was earlier, that expression you can’t quite recognise. She stands in place, as if torn, and suddenly she is resolved and she walks over to where you’re lying, crumpled, on the floor. Her bare feet with their dirty soles and jagged toenails are about a foot away from your nose when she kneels next to you. You can’t hear her over the raspy hacking noises you’re making and when you try you can’t move and so you are trapped there, lying on the floor next to her. Both of her bare knees are close enough that you could easily touch them. She looks dazed.

“I… I didn’t mean to,” she says, as if to herself. “I…” She stops, frowning. “You—did you—”

You can’t listen to this, you can’t listen to her, you can’t. This will kill you, she’ll kill you. Your vision is still blurry and your chest shrieks as you turn but as if on autopilot you reach up and you blindly grab at her so she will _shut up_. You can’t think and you can’t breathe but you can’t let her thoughts into you, you can’t let her see what’s in there. Your outspread hand connects with what you suppose must be her head, her hair tangling in your fingers, and you shove as hard as you can when suddenly her fist collides with your nose and with a sudden jarring explosion your head is ringing, back into the dazed darkness, her yells echoing in your ears. When she hit you she pushed your arm back down on the ground so your face is exposed, and you see her considering—feel her think about it, only a split second, but she did think, it wasn’t just instinct—before she draws her hand back and hits you again, hard, across the bruise she just made. And although you can hardly focus on anything at all, you can feel her sense of satisfaction. You can feel that she liked it, hitting you. 

“Don’t touch me,” she says, low, furious. 

You cough. Your face is throbbing. Dazed, you roll onto your back and stare at the ceiling. What else is there to do? She is on her knees next to you, her body tense. You focus on breathing in and out. You feel something wet run down the side of your face and realise that your nose is bleeding. When you swallow you can taste it in the back of your throat. At the very least your body has begun to control itself a little better in other regards. What are you supposed to say to her? You didn’t want to touch her, you just wanted her to go away. Hotter than the blood leaking along your cheek is the vicious, bright mortification you still feel. You can hear her resettle herself and when you look over she is watching you with a sort of—gleam in her eye. 

“I didn’t think I could do that,” she says, finally. “You know. To your neck.” It’s like she’s talking to herself. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

You try to think about it, but as another irreconcilable thought you had automatically put it away. Now, breathless, you don’t have the strength to grasp it, give it form, to really think it. “I didn’t think you could do that either,” you say, after a pause. It hurts to speak. “I didn’t think you would.” You don’t say: I thought you were going to kill me. You don’t say: I’ve never felt like that before.

In the ensuing silence you hear your blood hit the floor, a small, frail, sound. After a moment, she reaches over, and, very slowly, watching you like a feral animal, she uses the pad of her thumb to wipe your cheek. She presses into the swollen, hot flesh of your face for a second before pulling her hand back. She wipes her bloody thumb on her towel. Her hair is beginning to dry in a frizzy halo. Your head is still ringing. 

“You liked it,” she says. 

There are so many things you could say to this. Part of you can hardly believe that she said it, and now it’s been said, and nothing has happened. It’s a fact that you like things, that your body likes things, even those done by your most hated enemy; it’s a fact that now exists in the world, and nothing has happened. She is watching you very closely. Her breathing is sharp.

“You liked doing it to me,” you say, finally. You close your eyes. In the light your eyelids are pinkish-red and woven with little red ribbons of veins.

“Because I hate you,” she says. Her affect is flat and forced. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

“You know why.”

“Say it.”

As if it were that easy. As if you could just butcher what’s inside you and label each piece and send it out for consumption. As if you know what it is. You breathe in and out. You are using a technique to even out your breath that you learned long ago, that you could have sworn you’d forgotten.

“I don’t think you hate me as much as you want to hate me,” you say instead, finally. But when you open your eyes, she’s gone. 

The next morning you have a black eye. You press your fingers into it, one by one, slowly, watching yourself in the mirror. Your eye is swollen half-shut and you dig your thumb into the soft bruised flesh above the delicate hemisphere of your eyeball. Pressing hard.

\--

Of course, you’ve forgotten that you no longer wear that _stupid mask_ , your face is visible. The high collar on your coat doesn’t quite cover the livid bruises splashed up your tender throat. You hear whispers when you walk past—louder than the usual. Double-takes. Which is gratifying in its way. Your un-swollen eye has a subconjunctival haemorrhage the appearance of which you also find gratifying (having always had a childish flair for the dramatic that you would never admit, but nonetheless could never quite stamp out). After they heal your face they hand you a mirror and for a split-second you’re shocked that it’s still cleaven by a thin silver line. You forget, sometimes. You don’t look at your own face much.

In yet another briefing, after several hours of military tactics, Hux tells you that they’re doing a final sweep of Canto Bight before moving on. The networks and contacts they’ve been leveraging, and about which he’s been bragging relentlessly, are almost bearing fruit. “Unlike your original plan of… what was it… torching that vile pit to the ground?” he adds, in a display of insubordination kept between you two. A sort of private dance. 

He makes his face make a smile to indicate humour. He is actually thinking _You idiot fucking psychopath child_ with such venom it might as well be written above him in glowing letters. Do other people see this, or is it just you? Obviously you know when you are actually prying into someone’s head, when you are sliding in through their wet synapses to the beating core inside, but nobody ever taught you where the line between force and not-force is. Is Hux’s incredible and relentless duplicity as obvious to everyone else? What thoughts live inside people, and what leaks out? What do normal people see? Or know?

When you’ve been silent too long, the smirk slides off Hux’s face.

“As opposed to your plan, which is truly proving its merits by… what, exactly?” you say. “What have you actually done? As far as I can tell, General, you’ve allowed the regime to be embarrassed by letting that scum continue—”

“As opposed to being beaten by an untrained girl several times over in direct combat? And forcing us to waste considerable time and resources on this ridiculous little hunt for her—you’re obsessed—”

You’re standing now, face to snarling face. 

“All for this one silly junkyard rat,” Hux finishes, breathing heavily. He waits a few seconds, collecting himself. Something occurs to him and, forcing himself to smile, he stops. Recalibrates. “You know,” he says. “I know you think I don’t, but I do understand.”

You haven’t thought anything of the sort. You don’t want to hear him speculate about what you think.

“As I said to you before—” exaggerated shrug, “the heart,” extreme disdain on the word, again the affected worldly sigh, “it wants what it wants. A bit of the old slap and tickle, you know. I’ve been there myself.”

“You’re a fool,” you say, harshly, instinctively, before you meant to. You knew what he was going to say, what he was going to imply, and still it throws you, the repulsive and suggestive way his lip curls around the words, caressing them. You cannot bear being taken into the confidence of other people, which is likely why you cannot bear Hux, who seems to manoeuvre solely via conspiratorial chumminess when not pompously threatening everyone around him. 

“And yet you’re the one leading us all on a wild goose chase,” Hux replies. Now that he has supposedly figured it all out, he has decided to be magnanimous with you. “You know, Canto Bight has an excellent… reputation for this sort of thing. Very discreet. We’re leaving at the end of the week. You might want to stop by before then.”

“Get out,” you snap, and he puts his hands up in exaggerated surrender before exiting the room, smirk intact.

\--

Ever since he died (since you murdered him) you haven’t been able to sleep. When you close your eyes it happens over and over. You were scared out of your fucking mind, of course. Sometimes, it’s a different death—the body stiffening in your arms, and falling from a great height. You never know until it happens, who it’s going to be. You wake up shaking. 

What you remember, also: the resolution. Fear, yes, and a sort of otherworldy sense of surprise that you were actually going to do this—but resolution, too. You had never felt that before; there had always been conflict at your core, essential almost to your entire self, conflict Snoke had seen and hated and punished you for relentlessly. But when she arrived on your ship, you’d suddenly felt sure of what had to happen. It was a foreign feeling. You knew what you had to do, even though you were certain that you would probably die or get both of you killed. But it was like something had fallen into place within you, like the two fractured halves of your warring self had settled into each other suddenly. You had thought you’d felt the kiss of fate before when you fell limp into Snoke’s arms, but still there had been a fraction that struggled and fought. Looking back, you suppose it might have been Rey herself. That shining and small part of what you might call your soul that was actually her, calling to you. It stands to reason, of course, that the good piece of you is really someone else, connected to you through some accident of fate. It obligated you to try.

The part you had that you somehow kept secret from even Snoke: in your visions she loved you, or something close. You knew it wasn’t a dream because in your dreams you didn’t exist. But in your visions she held you. Your face pressed into her neck. It felt so real: the smell of her hair, the warmth of the crease of her neck. And other things, too, that you would prefer not to remember: her fingers digging into your shoulders, her harsh cut-off gasp (the same one you’d heard in the gym: you recognised it from this denied future), how she smiled down on you. When she’d arrived on the ship, you’d finally known that it was real, that you were destined, that you could no more fight what you had to do next than you’d been able to fight any of fate’s dictates. Your bodies had moved in unison as you fought together. It had all been perfect, until it wasn’t.

\--

Later, here you are—here in another place that you can’t quite remember getting to. The shame feels physical, sick and hot, in your body, in your mind. You feel your face burning. 

The prostitute is buxom and yellow-haired and perhaps not entirely human. Her voice makes her sound stupid. You suppose lots of men like that. She wiggles about in front of you as you sit on her bed that who knows how many other men have defiled with their foul bodies and vile desires. All the sweat these men have sweat into this bed, into this woman. She turns around and touches your shoulder, and her hand is clammy. She calls you handsome, which you know she doesn’t think. No need even to push into her mind.

Earlier that night, the top brass had gone to a casino when the ink had dried on the final exchange. You had been working by yourself in your room and your head was so silent it ached. The planes of your mind had different echoes, now, solitude where there was none before, whole surfaces exposed that you hadn’t seen in years. Things you’d tucked away, buried like treasure for some distant day where you could be alone in yourself. It was overwhelming, what was there for you to see. You were alone in a way that you had never been before, even before when you ached from loneliness. You needed it to stop. Hux had a small-minded philistine’s sordid worldview, but his little talk, or whatever it was, had planted something in your mind. You could do things, now, that you couldn’t do before. 

In civilian clothing, in the expensive bar, you'd drank whatever it was, and then your glass had been refilled and you drank that, too, and then more. You drank so rarely—who knew what could happen once you did?—and it had gone straight to your head. There were women to serve you, gleaming bodies and coiffed hair, and around them male faces red and bloated and spittle-flecked. It was suffocating, but you were a little drunk and you looked at the woman and you thought, a little giddy to really be thinking it, about how soft they looked, about the curves of their bodies. You thought and thought about it, digging farther and farther into the thought like gouging a wet eyeball from a soft face, your mouth working with something like greed. It had been so long since you’d wanted what you wanted. When the blonde woman had approached, you had a moment of weakness. You'd wondered what you might be able to do, now. You wondered if a woman might find you attractive. 

So now here you are. “You’ve gotta relax, cutie,” she says, aiming for flirtatious. You have no idea what to say to this, but then, without warning you, she touches your face, near your browline. Something ignites in you and without even thinking you raise your hand. She rears back, eyes rolling like a frightened horse. She looks terrified and for a second you feel better, you feel powerful, but her breasts are heaving and she looks small and pathetic (not like—but no). This is what you’ve been reduced to. You are no better than the soldiers you have flayed for drunken idiocy. You are disgusting. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, and slowly your fist floats down to your side. You’re intensely aware of the physical realities of the room: your chest is heaving like hers, the flush on your face mimicking hers, her breasts are still wobbling slightly as she watches you. She is wary of you, and you like that. A sudden flicker of disgust across her face and—well, yes, you definitely like that, and much more than you did her fear. Did you know you would? Is that why you came here?

“Stop looking so frightened,” you hiss, which of course has the opposite effect. If only she would fight back; if only she would let it out, the revulsion you saw, just for a second. You know it’s in there. You just don’t know how to ask her for it—what do you even want from her?

“I’m sorry, sir,” she says, and her lip quivers just a little. Are you supposed to like that better? Killing her would be easy. Nobody would miss her. But it wouldn’t be fair to make her suffer. This is your fault.

You can’t go through with this. You stand up and she flinches away from you again. She’s about the same height as—no. “I’m sorry,” you say, your voice rough, and you put money on the table. “I didn’t mean to.”

You feel her relief, as you walk away. In your pocket you dig your fingers into your thigh until it’s all you can feel, the shame and anger and humiliation in four sharp points. Away you scuttle. 

Back in your room you undress and you put your sleeping clothes on and you avoid looking at your face. In the dark, alone (alone!), you try to think of the prostitute’s pretty face, her body. You think of how scared she looked and how that made you feel powerful for a brief moment. In the privacy of your mind you try to arrange the facts appropriately as if for consumption by a superior. It was the fear on her face; she cowered before you and you felt like a prince. You try to focus on this. But as your strokes quicken, something sliding beneath your consciousness decides something, and in your head she stands to face you. Instead of telling you she’s sorry, she sneers at you and slaps you, hard, her palm burning and bisecting the bridge of your nose. 

In one hand you have your cock and in the other you are pressing into your thigh again where you hurt yourself earlier. Your tender flesh. In your mind the woman slaps you again and again, pushes you onto the bed and holds your wrists beneath her knees, palms down on the linen, humiliatingly bare and touching where who knows how many other men have touched. You can’t move because she won’t let you. In your head you picture her calling you awful things and pulling your hair and slapping you again and again. Her hair is brown and she is slight and flat-chested and she strikes you over and over until tears run from your eyes and you taste your own blood in your mouth. She takes great fistfuls of your hair and you imagine it being torn from your scalp in agonising clumps. 

She wraps her little hands around your neck and calls you a monster and squeezes with all her might, and you have to take it. “You’re sick,” she says, her mouth on your mouth, tasting your blood. “You sicken me, Ben.” You’ve been here before. In this fantasy she doesn’t let you touch her at all. “You poison _everything_.”

And then, so hard it hurts, you come and cover yourself in your own mess. Your thigh is burning where you’ve been digging into it and you release your fingers, suddenly. You feel so abject it approaches despair, compounding further the surge of raw anger and sickness. In the bathroom, you wash off and you grip the sides of the sink until your wrists start to creak and you take great panic breaths until you no longer want to hurt something or yourself.

As automatic as your breath is the compulsive thought: what if he saw that, what if he knows? About what you are and what you want? And like claws digging in: of course he knew, he knew everything (almost—almost!), and again, there it is, the humiliation. He knew everything. He saw your compassion for what it truly was. You tried so hard to excise that part of yourself, pare away the tender and rotting flesh until the strong core of only what is necessary remained. And still you couldn't do it. Still you can't do it. 

You silently dress and you go to the gym and you run until it tears at your lungs and your heart stutters and skips, until your whole body feels like you're on fire. 

\--

“Rough night?” Hux says, smirking.

\--

Easier than anything are the moments when you are a body. You are a neat sequence of events leading to a desirable outcome. You want to be faster and stronger, and you work until you are. On the battlefield, you are in your body and in your body you have control. A blade through the heart, a broken neck, a severed limb. When you bleed and ache it is only on the outside. 

Years later, your mind has been well-tempered under extensive tutelage but your dreams are dangerous, incoherent fanged beasts. Flashes of unconnected images and fears and desires, flesh and blood and smoke. The slick slide of the cleaven body. Hux, turning purple, scraping at his abraded neck. Feelings and images. Regret and shame. Your parents, sometimes. Terror. Her face, like a great open flower turning towards the sun. What you wanted and how badly you wanted it. Rarely, if ever, do you feature in them yourself, do you even exist. Things just happen inside you.

After a particularly bad night, you usually woke up covered in sweat. First thought, a long-held habit: had he seen what was inside your treacherous little heart? You tried, with meditation and fasting and the oblivion of exhaustion, to extinguish your dreams, but they wouldn’t leave you alone. You had been trained to want only one thing, and when you were awake you did as you were told, but in your dreams there were all kinds of needs and wants and desires you could hardly reconcile with yourself, that you could scarcely believe originated inside yourself. You were scared that they held some kind of truth. In the pitted warfield of your mind there was safe territory and there was not and with Snoke’s discipline you learned to distinguish the two as best you could. You were a blind animal on a leash but you did learn. 

Now you are free—for a given value of free—but in the mornings you still check that you haven’t betrayed yourself. You are still not alone. Now you brush up against her presence and not his. Softly waiting. You want it to hurt more than it does. It feels strange, that it doesn’t hurt any more.

\--

The next time she comes to you you’re asleep, finally. Five am or thereabouts, limping into bed another long run—you’re starting to give yourself shin splints, of all things, your legs screaming at you from a bucket of bacta and ice every evening, taped up every morning. You hadn’t quite drifted off to sleep but you’d practiced relaxing each muscle group in turn like you’d been taught (where? by whose ghost, looking over you now?) up to your clenched and aching jaw. Eventually you’d stopped jerking awake and, you suppose, had been unconscious or at least partially there. And then you felt something and you jerked awake, nauseated and feeling like you were going to fall out of yourself from exhaustion.

“You look terrible,” Rey says. You feel yourself tense instinctively, and—what, really? You’re losing your fucking mind and you’re worried about how she thinks you look? You slowly pull yourself upright, and when you look over, she is staring at you with an expression, you slowly realise, is concern. She looks healthy. Her face is flushed.

You’d hoped, at the very least, that you wouldn’t have to see her anymore. You’ve lost or destroyed almost everything by now; why not this? What blind god of fate is keeping you in this doorless cage? 

“I was asleep,” you say, finally, stupidly. The floor spins when you look at it. When you look up at her, you see the concerned o of her mouth, her face scrunched up, staring at you with something like shock on her face. “I haven’t—been able to—”

To her surprise but also your own a hysterical laugh comes burbling up from somewhere like vomit. “I wasn’t able to think when he was alive,” you say, which you did not realise you were going to say. She stares at you with that familiar and foxlike mix of concern and cunning, your clever girl, cold-hearted in how intrigued she is by your weakness. 

“Because you were afraid,” she says, finally, and you hear perfectly well what she is really saying: _because you were a coward._

“No,” you say. Your head is pounding and your eyes feel like they’re in pits of sand. “You are very foolish.” You pinch the bridge of your nose between your fingers. In your head you can feel whatever she is brushing up against whatever you are, gently. Like someone calling to you from just a little too far away, like a gentle echo. It feels good. You focus on the physical things around you: the tape on your shins (thankfully hidden beneath loose trousers), the cold floor beneath your feet, your finger and thumb pressing down on either side of your nose, hard enough to hurt.

“So tell me,” she says. “What you meant instead. Go on.”

Again—there is so much you can say. Tell me what you meant to say. How? How do you describe an experience from inside that experience—how to draw the boundaries around it and pull it out of you, neatly, and say: here, Rey, this is what happened. This is a thing that happened to me, and now you can see it. How do you pull it out and stay whole after? What remains?

“I wasn’t afraid,” you say, finally, “because afraid was not something I was allowed to feel. So I stopped. I stopped doing everything that he didn’t allow. He made me stop.”

This is not quite what you mean to say, but there’s only so much you can do. You could show her. Maybe one day. Unless one of you is dead, of course. 

There is a vast and humming silence. Your eyes are still closed. In the darkness you can hear her breathing. 

“When was that?”

“I think I was fifteen.”

“You _think_?” she says. “You don’t remember when you murdered all those Jedi?”

Your jaw clenches so quickly your teeth make an audible little tick noise. “Is that what he told you?” you say. Your shins hurt. When you open your eyes and look at her the world around you moves slightly out of sync with you, as if you’re drunk. In the back of your throat you can taste acid. She has moved into her proud little pose, a statuesque goddess of truth, so full of her own self-righteousness you could spit. “And he saw it, did he? After he tried to murder me?”

“He wasn’t going to, I told you—”

“You’re so convinced that he told you the truth—that they all told you the truth—”

“What happened, then?” she snaps, her cheeks flushed. “Not that I can trust you, of course, but go on. What happened if you didn’t murder them?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t remember. It’s gone. I—”

“That’s not true,” she says, her voice higher, a tear trembling in her eye? perhaps? and inside you something cracks and wildly you think believe me just this once. Despite your fatigue you’re still fast enough to grab her arm before she can pull away, and standing there with her wrist braceleted by your fingers you open yourself wholly to her mind: the child you were, your sick terrified gut drop at the twisted face looming over you in the black night, the darkness, the knowledge that you’d die with your throat slit and cauterised on a dark wet island in the sea surrounded by people who’d be happy to see you die burbling in your own blood in a dirt hut, and then—the horrible blankness, shocking and violently wrong, like torn flesh—and then your shaking self washed up on the shores of some distant empire. Her wrist is clammy under your fingers and you loosen your hand and pull away. You can’t show her what happened, with Snoke. What you did then. Standing next to you she is shivering slightly.

“Believe me,” you say. You don’t know what happened but you know what it left inside of you, a the void that is somehow presence; you know this. “I don’t remember it.”

A wave of fatigue leaves you blurry-eyed and wobbling, and you go to sit back down on the bed. She follows you, one foot in front of another, as if sleepwalking, before she pulls herself together and stops. You sink in front of her, hunching into yourself. 

“You were so young,” she says, finally. Almost wonderingly. Standing in front of you, again faintly illuminated by some warm light. You wish you could see where she is. 

“So were you,” you say. “We both were.” 

You don’t remember falling asleep, but when you wake up it’s like you haven’t slept at all. The same dull relentless pounding in your chest, just as always. 

\--

“We have them,” Hux says, triumphant. He pulls the documents up for you and stands there, smirking. “I told you my contacts would pay off. They always do. We’ll have them all dead by the end of the week. They’ll rue the day they crossed me.”

Inside, a twinge, an alarmed shriek you instinctively bury from prying eyes now gone. Your traitorous other half, moving sharply inside you. All these things inside you that aren’t you. Whatever you are, whatever choices you have left to make, bent into shape by fate. 

Here it is. What are you going to do?

\--

The final time you see her is in a dream. A vision, maybe. One second it’s the usual inchoate jumble of faces and oceans, the pullulating mess that you are at night, teetering on the edge of consciousness and then next—everything resolves itself like coming into focus, and there she is. There you are, too. 

“I think I’m asleep,” she says. “It feels different.”

“I think it happens when we’re vulnerable,” you say. “Every time it’s been the same. I think I’m asleep too.”

You are walking towards each other, cautiously. 

“I still can’t see anything around you. Only you.”

“Yes. Me neither.”

Everywhere you look, the neural network of your brain reworking itself, quiet and relentless, teeming. Here are tides. Here are green trees. Here is a great blue sky. The sun is shining on her face. On both your faces. The edges of her body bleed into all of you all around her. You have never felt so peaceful inside yourself. It feels like a reprieve.

“I’m going to have to kill you,” she says. “I know you’re coming for us.”

“For you,” you say. “I don’t care about those idiot friends of yours.”

“They’re not idiots,” she snaps. Loyal to the last. You could laugh, but instead you shrug, conceding the point. Why argue now?

She keeps a wary eye on you while she looks around. You wonder what she sees. What’s in her head, surrounding you, your edges kissing each other? Behind her—orchids, blooming, suddenly there and then gone. You always liked orchids. Her elegant lines flowing into them, into nothing. Faded borders.

You close your eyes. You’re so tired. It’s peaceful, here, in the silence. You can feel her in every breath. Perhaps you could just have this. Just this. Maybe once. 

“Ben,” she says, softly. 

You don’t reply. You know what she’s going to say. You just want this one last moment.

“Ben,” she says, again, and when you open your eyes and look at her you see that same proud agony you know so well.

“Don’t—” you say, just as she says, “You don’t have to—”

“Stop,” you say. “Please.”

“I can’t,” she says. “I have to try.”

“Please.”

She squares up, sets her chin. “Ben,” she says again. 

“You won’t forgive me,” you say, cutting her off. There’s something like panic rising in you. “You think you will because you want to think you’re good. But I know you. You’ll never forgive me. So you can just stop.”

“I know you, too,” she says. “You were a child, you didn’t have a choice—”

“I made my choice! I made it—I made it over and over and over. I paid for everything I have. I paid everything.”

“I know,” she says. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Her hands are in fists by her sides, her jaw clenched. Despite her pleading tone, she’s furious, with great waves distorting the air around her, just like when you were young and alone in the middle of the ocean. 

What would it mean, to be free?

“You’re going to lose. You and all your traitor friends are going to die,” you say. “Can’t you see that? What are you fighting for?”

“I’m fighting for what’s right. What are you fighting for?” she snarls. There are red blotches high on her cheekbones, more red staining her neck, leaking from the high collar of her coat.

“What’s right? I didn’t realise that murderous cults were right,” you say. The same old story again. “Rey,” you say, “why can’t you understand that they’re gone? They’re in the past. We’re in control now. We can change everything.”

Her eyes are sad. She is breathing heavily. “You’re not in control,” she says. “I know you think you are, but you aren’t.”

“You don’t know what I think,” you say.

“I do,” she says. She is walking towards you with a heavy deliberate panther’s step and then you are facing each other, as close as you’ve ever been, as close as when you fought with her back against yours. “I know you,” she says.

She gestures with her hand, very slightly. You are on your knees, which you don’t remember doing. Your face is on a level with her waist. Very slowly, eyes darting between yours, she lifts her right hand and reaches out. You could move. You could snap her fingers, her delicate wrist. But you’re allowed to want what you want, now. Maybe in another world you both wanted this and then you both got what you wanted. It could have happened. Why not? 

Her thumb starts on your forehead, cool, and you close your eyes as she traces her scar, her palm skimming down your nose. You can hear your breath and how it comes in irregular jolts like it’s being forced out of you. Her hand comes to a rest on the soft flesh beneath your chin, the thumb pressed gently in, pulling the skin. There’s a hollow there that wasn’t there before. Your body following your mind. Watching you, very carefully, she keeps her thumb in place and slides her fingers open and across until they are spanning the width of your throat. 

“I know you,” she says, again. You open your eyes.

“Yes,” you say. Something gives way, somewhere. You can hear her heartbeat, echoing around inside you. She rests a thumb on one carotid artery and her fingers on the other. You can feel your pulse beat against her hand, a dull endless throb. Waves on the shore.

“Please,” she says. A tear spills down her cheek. Almost imperceptibly, her fingers tighten.

You can’t speak. Inside you is an earthquake. A great yawning chasm. But you know what you have to do. You made your choice a very long time ago. You have always been obligated by duty.

Slowly, faintly, you shake your head. 

Her mouth sets in the determined line you have loved since you first met her, although you see now that some part of you has always known and loved her, more even than you hated her. Since you were a child. Some faint brightness beyond the horizon. A chance you almost had. A choice you were almost given.

She is crying as she joins her hands around your neck and squeezes, hard.

When you wake up, you realise you’ve been crying, too. There are bruises around your neck. Your face is wet and swollen. You hardly recognise yourself. 

\--

Some people go places and some people just end up places. Some people are fated and some are exiled by fate and some are just doomed. You understood that when you were younger; you knew that things didn’t just happen. You believed in destiny, though you didn’t understand it. Or much of anything. Amd then, along the way, the borders of whatever you were finally gave way and then there was no meaningful distinction between it and Snoke and the First Order and the darkness you’d found yourself treading water in. You were inside it, but there was no outside.

Now you know better, of course; now you understand. That fate exists, yes, but is random and cruel and maybe not always right. Things have always had to happen as they would happen, despite what you may or may not want. You end up becoming yourself. But here, on the other side of it all, you don’t understand why any of it had to happen to you.


End file.
